Great nations have great heritage. People love to know their past through visual objects. These can be in a variety of manifestations, roads, forts, palaces, cities, towns, markets, canals, parks, sarais and the rest of it. These structures come up during the long periods of history, which is usually interspersed with eras of rise and decline of ruling dynasties, kingdoms and empires. As time marches on, many of these objects of heritage meet with decay owing to vagaries of weather and negligence of human beings.
Our State, too, has its share of proud heritage that speaks of our past history. These objects remind us of the vision of grandeur and aesthetic taste of our ancestors. For any nation, these objects are a matter of pride. The history of our State is thousands of years old. The Burzahom excavations in Kashmir valley speak of her Neolithic age civilization. Tracing our history from that hoary past, we walk down the lane of memory and come to the most recent times, the modern times, with a different pattern of heritage property. Today dams, canals, roads, flyovers, railways, bridges, ferries, laboratories and mega industries are our modern objects of heritage. A hundred years from now all these structures that we have made become our heritage. And in this way the nations moves onwards and the history moves onwards. Heritage and history are complimentary to each other.
The question is can we preserve our heritage in the shape of monuments, structures and other manifestations? This is a debatable issue. As far as more significant pieces of heritage are concerned, forts, palaces, bridges, parks, tanks, wells, sarais etc. all are exposed to severe weather conditions. The decay seeps in silently despite our best efforts to preserve these. Therefore the nature will ask for its toll and we have to pay it. In the process many objects of heritage will gradually disappear and we cannot help.
But this does not mean that we leave everything to the whims of nature. All big and historical countries of the world have set up public institutions that are entrusted with the task of projecting and preserving objects of heritage and of historical importance. In our country we have the Archaeological Survey of India which was incepted by the British rulers. Because India is a vast country and has chequered history, the number and size of her objects of heritage are incredible. That is the reason why the Archaeological Survey of India has its branches in many states. This is in addition to the State Archaeological Department. These two agencies work in unison in identifying new heritage sites and objects and in preserving the ones that have already been excavated and identified. This is a continuous process because there could be many more sites still hidden from the eyes of the antiquarians. These agencies have trained personnel in their workforce who are experienced in excavating new sites and preserving the existing ones. The State is expected to cooperate with the ASI and fortunately this is being done as far as our state is concerned. The pace of work may be slow at one site or the other, but the process of preservation is on.
It is true that during one hundred years of Dogra rule, our state has had the pride of contributing lavishly to Dogra heritage. Its manifestations are spread over the entire Jammu region of Dogra kingdom. Many habitations came up around the heritage sites and contributed to the prosperity of the State. The ASI has taken up; the Mubarak Mandi complex reconstruction. It is a huge complex and will take many years to bring the work of its reconstruction to completion. Likewise Bahu Fort is another major object of heritage which carries with it the history of Jammu region, its ruling houses and their wars and achievements. We can count dozens of such sites that enrich the heritage fund of the land of Dogra rulers. It is in fitness of things that all efforts are made to preserve these objects for future generations.
One of the ways of perpetuating national heritage is that as far as possible these should be converted into museums along modern lines and thrown open to public for their visits, sight seeing and research. These objects of heritage are a living source of the history and style of architecture of the days when these had come up. For any student of history, a visit to these sites would be almost as good as reading dozens of books written on them. We know that in western countries, most of the sites and objects of heritage have been converted into museums. We know doing so entails enormous expenditures. But it should not be thought that preservation of heritage is only the job of the government. People who are conscious of their historical past, and who have the capacity to enrich cultural fund of the nation, they have to campaign for involvement of the community in this task of nation building. People contribute lavishly to raise worshipping places, temples, mosques, gurudwaras and churches. This is their faith. Likewise it should not be difficult to inculcate the sense of preserving heritage as part of our pride in our cultural fund.
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